Mysterious Aviator by Nevil Shute Page A

about it all.

CHAPTER THREE
    L ENDEN SLEPT till about nine o’clock that night, and woke up more or less himself. I was working at the rent rolls in the sitting-room when I heard him stirring through the open doors, because it was getting on towards Quarter Day, and I’m always pretty full up about that time. I went in to have a look at what he was up to, and found him sitting up in bed.
    “Evening,” I said. “How d’you feel now?”
    He moistened his lips. “I’m better,” he said thickly. He shivered suddenly, and slid down beneath the bedclothes again. “I’ve had the hell of a go … this time. A proper searcher.”
    I went and sat on the foot of his bed. “Want a drink? There’s something there—barley water, or something. Or I’ll get you a whisky.”
    He craned his head to look at the tumbler. “No. Thanks. Not now. I’ll go to sleep again in a bit. I don’t ever remember being like this. What’s the time?”
    “About nine o’clock.”
    He passed one hand heavily across his forehead. “There was a girl here this afternoon,” he muttered. “She gave me some stuff to drink.”
    I nodded. “Miss Darle,” I said. “She told me she’d been with you.”
    “Oh.” He was silent for a minute. “I was talking a good bit,” he said thickly. “I hope to God I wasn’t telling stories.”
    I laughed. “I don’t know what you said,” I remarked. “But, anyway, you didn’t say anything to shock her.”
    He smiled faintly. “That’s all right, then,” he muttered. “Matter of fact, I don’t know what I was talking about, but I know I was talking.”
    I made him comfortable for the night, persuaded him to havea drink, and he rolled over on his side to go to sleep again. I left him to it.
    I went back into the sitting-room and shut up my books. There were a couple of ledgers and the cash-book of the mansion there among the others; I piled these three together and went to put them in the safe. The top of the safe is a sort of repository for all the odds and ends that lie about my rooms and never get tidied up. I was brought up sharply as I approached it by the sight of that box of plates.
    There it was, lying on the top of the safe with all the other junk. One of the maids must have put it there when she tidied up the room in the morning. I opened the safe and put away my books, and then picked this thing up and carried it over to the fire. It was a rectangular, flat metal box, roughly half-plate size, made of brass oxidised or blackened in some way, and neatly finished.
    I sat down uneasily before the fire, and had a good look at the thing. It wasn’t mine. It hadn’t anything to do with me, really. It belonged to Lenden, and to him it was worth approximately one thousand pounds—the fee that he had taken. He had that money in his bank.
    It was nothing to do with me at all. That was the basic conclusion that I came to, at the end of a quarter of an hour.
    I sat there for a long time, turning the thing over uneasily in my hands, wondering what the devil they were up to at Portsmouth, and why the Soviet wanted to know about it. I didn’t see what interest it could hold for them; they couldn’t possibly be contemplating naval action against us. They hadn’t got a navy, for one thing. I didn’t see why they should be interested in our dockyards, other than from a purely academic standpoint. It seemed to me that their attitude might very well be: “That’s a nice-looking dockyard; let’s have one like that at Tkechkrotsz”—but it was hardly likely that they would be interested in the proposition—“That’s the place to hit this handsome dockyard a cruel blow when we want to put it out of action next week.”
    And yet, it must be something like that. The people atPortsmouth evidently thought it was important, to judge from the precautions they were taking. Sending up aeroplanes to shoot him down … It seemed to me that he couldn’t possibly have been right about that. His